From Travel to Text: Reverends Wolff and Lansdell’s Missions to Bokhara

Nearly half a century separates the missions to Bokhara, centre of Islamic knowledge and culture in Central Asia, made by the two intrepid travellers and preachers Joseph Wolff (1795–1862) and Henry Lansdell (1841–1919): an important generational and geopolitical gap both in the development of the Victorian era and in the evolution of travel and travel writing. When Joseph Wolff saw Bokhara in 1843, Central Asia was at the peak of Anglo-Russian rivalry, an extremely dangerous and violent place where his two compatriots, British envoys Charles Stoddard and Arthur Conolly, lost their lives. Lansdell’s subsequent travels there in 1882 and 1888 discovered Bokhara subdued and pacified under Russian ‘civilising mission’. My paper will examine the strategies Wolff and Lansdell employed in writing their journeys to Central Asian sensitive border regions under the imperial security constraints of the moment. Their failure of self-censorship in fact erupts in concealed messages to certain sections of Victorian readership able to read between the lines, revealing the undisclosed and unsaid.